a blog by Oliver Peters

Monthly Archives: October 2007

It was 1968 when fellow film student George Lucas first introduced Walter Murch to Francis Ford Coppola. The trio was invited to a demo of the new CMX600 nonlinear editing system. This early computer workstation was the precursor to modern NLEs, but could only handle several minutes worth of black-and-white footage. In spite of that, they had seen the future and boldly predicted this device would sweep the industry in five years. That proved to be off the mark, of course. Nevertheless, this chance meeting sealed a relationship that would last for decades – leading Coppola to give Murch his start in feature film editing, first as a sound editor and mixer on The Rain People and later as a picture editor for The Conversation. Fast forward nearly forty years to find Coppola and Murch united again on Youth Without Youth – Francis Ford Coppola’s first film in ten years.

Coppola wrote, produced and directed Youth Without Youth, adapting the screenplay from a novella by legendary Romanian author Mircea Eliade. The film stars Tim Roth as Dominic Matei, an elderly professor whose mysterious rejuvenation heightens his intelligence and whose apparent immortality makes him a target for the Nazis in this World War II-era parable. Coppola characterized the film as “a love story wrapped in a mystery.” Sony Pictures Classics has picked up distribution for fall, so pre-release information is tight; but Walter Murch was willing to add that, “It’s a little bit of Faust meets Dorian Gray.” The film also stars Alexandra Maria Lara, Bruno Ganz, Andre M. Hennicke, Marcel Iures and introduces Alexandra Pirici.

Taking the Digital Route

Walter Murch spoke on the project’s unique workflow at this year’s NAB Final Cut Pro Users Group SuperMeet and was kind enough to elaborate more about it with me recently. When you think of Coppola or Murch and the big-budget films they’ve done together or separately, such as The Godfather series, Apocalypse Now, Cold Mountain or Jarhead, it’s hard to fathom that the approach taken on Youth Without Youth provides a perfect roadmap for the indie filmmaker determined to use desktop tools to tell the story. Youth Without Youth is an almost total digital production – Coppola’s first. Certain material was captured on 35mm for various reasons – speed variation, three-camera setups, etc. – but it appears that working digitally turned out to be so creatively and technically satisfying that the director has vowed never to shoot a motion picture on film stock again.

Francis Ford Coppola financed the production himself for a limited budget – under ten million dollars – so it became important to own or control as much of the process as possible. The digital parts of Youth Without Youth were shot with Coppola’s two Sony F900 CineAlta camcorders, which in turn were fed to an HDCAM-SR field recorder. The onboard HDCAM recorders of the F900 cameras actually record the 1920×1080 HD signal with a sampling of 1440×1080 pixels in 3:1:1 color space. By sending the uncompressed, full raster 4:2:2 signal from the camera to the SR recorder, the team was able to preserve more of the camera’s inherent image quality. In addition, the SR deck features the unique ability to record two simultaneous 4:2:2 A and B camera inputs onto a single tape. These recordings became the equivalent of the film negative and were used for the final digital intermediate. The onboard HDCAM tapes were used as back-up tapes for reviewing footage and to create DVCAM copies for ingest into the Final Cut Pro editing station.

The Villa

Production started in Bucharest in October of 2005 with the Coppola team working out of a rented Romanian villa that served as a combination of production offices, post and living quarters. At the time, Murch was wrapping up the mix on Jarhead, so the initial assembly of Youth Without Youth was handled by Romanian editor Corina Stavila and her assistant, Andrei Dascalescu, working on a single Final Cut Pro station with media in DVCAM resolution. Coppola shot a total of 162 hours, which is the equivalent of nearly 900,000 feet of 35mm film, so the first assembly came in at about 3 and a half hours long. Stavila and Coppola’s next cut brought that down to 2 hours and 50 minutes, and this version was up-rezzed to HDCAM by Dascalescu. Murch joined the team in April 2006, along with Sean Cullen, long time first assistant and associate editor; Kevin Bailey, a post-production intern; and Pete Horner, sound designer and rerecording mixer with whom Murch had worked on Apocalypse Redux. The HDCAM version was screened at 2K resolution on a Christie digital cinema projector and at that point there was a collective sigh of relief as everyone was encouraged by the crisp and striking images on the fifty-foot wide screen.

Over the next few months, Murch set about the task of reviewing the dailies and recutting the film. His initial version trimmed a further 30 minutes (including restoring ten minutes of scenes that had been cut); however, the target was to bring in the film at two hours. Murch offered this rule-of-thumb, “I have found you can only cut out about 30% from a first assembly by tightening. If that gets you down to the target length, then every scene in the assembly is going to be in the finished film. But if the film has to be even shorter, you can’t just use ‘dieting and exercise.’ You have to start making more drastic surgical changes and lose some major parts of the film. Francis is a process-oriented director. He has a powerful overall vision of what he wants, but welcomes experimentation and collaboration and loves to see the film continue to reveal itself through all stages of the filmmaking process. So he encouraged us to try dropping scenes and rearranging the structure where it seemed appropriate.”

Vertical Editing

One of the advantages that Murch found to the digital image was a greater ability to manipulate it when compared with film. “Film has grain that’s fixed in size at the molecular level, but pixels are different. When you magnify a digitally-sourced image, pixels are recalculated and averaged mathematically, so the image stays sharper longer. You don’t have grain getting in the way and shots can be blown up far more than with film. The rule of thumb with 35mm is that the grain starts to become obvious when the image is blown up more than 20%. Some shots in Youth Without Youth, however, were resized more than 120% with no visible artifacts. Arranging shots along a timeline would be considered horizontal editing, so I guess you could call this vertical editing: editing the image within the frame. Francis deliberately shot most of this film with locked-off cameras, limiting camera movement to specific moments for maximum impact. So sometimes, I would need to adjust a shot for headroom, but we also modified framing in cinematically playful ways. About a third of the shots had something done to them in post as part of the storytelling language. I was slightly apprehensive before I started doing this, thinking that it might become a time-suck, but it was quickly obvious that Final Cut Pro could handle this kind of work effortlessly, and it became second-nature. We were very lucky to have Kevin with us, because he turned out to be a whiz with Shake. The film has about 200 effects shots. Most of them were done by UPP, a great effects house in Prague, but 60 shots were done in-house by Kevin. These included getting rid of non-period artifacts, dust-busting, invisible split-screens and some blue-screen compositing.” In September, Murch worked with Coppola in Bucharest to get the cut down to two hours and a lock.

The in-house approach carried through to finishing, as well. Sean Cullen picked up the story, “We did all the final up-rezzing in-house. When it came time to conform the SR tapes, though, we found that their timecode wasn’t frame-accurate with the HDCAM tapes, since the deck and the cameras hadn’t been fed from an independent master timecode generator. Many shots were up to three frames out, so we recaptured with handles and then eye-matched every shot to align the SR footage with the locked cut. Once this full-resolution footage was matched, we used Shake to generate DPX files from the FCP QuickTime movies and these were sent to Laser Pacific, our DI facility. The DPX image sequences were for complete scenes and not just individual shots, so we were taking complete responsibility for the accuracy of the conform.”

Sound also followed an unorthodox process. Sound designer Pete Horner flew Coppola’s Digidesign ICON console (last used on Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette) to Bucharest where he did the predub mixes in a specially-constructed room at Coppola’s villa. The concept of flying a film console halfway around the world and expecting it to work the day after it arrived would have been unthinkable in the days of analog behemoths, like SSL, Neve or Harrison film mixing desks; however, the ICON is a physically small but digitally powerful 128-input control surface that functions as the front-end for a Pro Tools workstation. It doesn’t have any audio signal going through it. As such, it’s robust and portable. Music for the film, composed by Osvaldo Golijov, was recorded in Bucharest and the soundtrack album was also mixed by Pete Horner on the same ICON board.

Walter Murch’s Thoughts on the Role of the Editor

According to Murch, the term editing is inadequate to describe today’s processes, preferring instead the French word montage – which implies the constructive aspects of the job. Murch said, “Film editing consists of three integrated parts: plumbing, performance and writing. These are all dependent on each other. Plumbing is the workflow – knowing how to get the media into and out of ever-more-complicated systems in the quickest and most reliable way possible. Then there’s performance: the editor has to respond artistically to the internal rhythms of the material and to extend and develop those rhythms further in actually constructing the film. The impulse that reveals when it’s the precise moment to make a cut is exactly like a drummer hitting a cymbal or a violinist plucking a string at the right time. Finally there is writing. The nature of film is ‘abundance’ and as a result you have to be creatively selective – on Youth Without Youth our shoot-to-final-film ratio was 80:1. This process of creative compression is like writing, but using the only vocabulary an editor has at hand – sounds and images. Which shot should follow which, like constructing a sentence. Then looking at the whole and deliberating about whether scenes, once constructed, are in the correct order or even ultimately necessary to the film.”

Digital production, simultaneous SR recording and DI-ready output from an inexpensive desktop system might sound like bleeding edge technology, but lessons learned on Youth Without Youth will prove invaluable for filmmakers at any budget level for years to come. Francis Ford Coppola has been a pioneer in applying video technologies to filmmaking, but this latest effort shows that desktop solutions are finally reaching the potential that was first hinted at nearly four decades ago.

Every war spawns stories and films about that effort, as we try to make sense of the incomprehensible and the affect it has on those directly and indirectly involved. In the Valley of Elah is one of what will undoubtedly be many films stemming from our involvement in the war in Iraq. This is the second feature film outing as a writer/director for Paul Haggis, coming on the heels of the Oscar-wining Crash, which Haggis also directed and co-wrote. Haggis adapted his screenplay from a Playboy magazine article by Mark Boal, called Death and Dishonor, as a portrayal of Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) – a grieving father looking for the truth of his son’s disappearance.

In the Valley of Elah is a murder-mystery framed by our involvement in Iraq. The title itself refers to the Old Testament location of the battle between David and Goliath, which serves as a metaphor for Deerfield’s conflicts. One underlying theme that Haggis tries to tackle is what happens on a personal level to the men and women asked to do physically and emotionally scarring things on behalf of our country. Deerfield is a retired military policeman who learns that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker) has gone AWOL after returning from active duty in Iraq. During his own investigation into the facts, Deerfield comes to realize that the official military story isn’t the complete truth but that the real story may be harder to accept. As he struggles to learn the facts, Deerfield is eventually aided by Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), a small town detective and single mother.

Jo Francis, who came to this project from the world of episodic series television, edited In the Valley of Elah. It just so happens that Francis is also Haggis’ sister, which seemed like a good starting point for my interview. Francis said, “I had been working on House and went on to edit the pilot for The Black Donnellys, which was Paul’s show. We realized that even though we were brother and sister, the collaboration was very good. So when the opportunity to do this film came along, I begged Paul to let me have a crack at it and it really turned out to be a great experience. Fortunately, we can keep family separate, so it’s a very professional and productive director-editor relationship.” Both come from the TV world, where Paul Haggis was involved in such shows as thirtysomething, Walker Texas Ranger and Family Law. According to Francis, this has its advantages. “Television is a great training ground for features. There’s always a time crunch, so you learn to work fast and find the best creative solutions in a very short time frame. By comparison, features are a much more relaxed pace and you can concentrate on a single project, instead of always having to think ahead to the next episode.”

Production on In the Valley of Elah started early December of last year in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Francis joined the team on location. The film was shot on 35mm by director of photography Roger Deakins and transferred to HD. Even so, it was ingested into the Avid Media Composer Adrenaline editing system at the compressed 14:1 standard definition resolution. Francis explained, “We had Adrenalines and Unity shared storage, but didn’t want to capture the footage as HD. When you are working with a lot of footage, even at compressed HD resolutions, the systems start to get a bit clunky and slow. Things are just more responsive when you are working in standard definition at the rough cut stage of post.” This film was a somewhat standard production affair – shot largely in a single-camera film style. Not many multi-camera set-ups and only a bit of crane, dolly and Steadicam work.

Jo Francis completed her first assembly by mid-February in Albuquerque. The project next shifted to New York where she worked with Haggis on the director’s cut. This was concluded by the end of May. Finally, post was wrapped up in Los Angeles, with Francis working up until September addressing studio notes and getting the picture locked. Many complex, modern films may have more than one editor, but Francis tackled this alone, with a single local assistant editor in each of the three cities. Francis pointed out that then it becomes fun for the editor. “When the picture is finally locked, you can relax a bit and enjoy the creativity of others. A lot of the pressure is off and that’s when it becomes fun for the editor. Now it’s in the hands of the sound department, music and DI. You help and add input to all of these areas as the editor, but it’s enjoyable to see the contributions added by others on the team.”

Organizing the Surplus

The first assembly of In the Valley of Elah clocked in at three hours, but by the time the cut was locked, the movie ran two hours. We discussed what it took to get there. Francis said, “When I first read the script, the story felt very linear to me and I didn’t think we would be able to rearrange a lot of scenes. As we got into it, though, I was surprised that the material actually lent itself rather well to being moved around as much as we did. Of course, for that sort of time reduction, you can’t avoid dropping things. A lot of trims were made in the beginning and end of the film. For example, we felt that we needed to get the Tommy Lee Jones character on his journey more quickly, so parts were cut out to speed the story along at the start. We cut other scenes that would have given us too many endings, had they stayed. One big scene that was cut out was an elaborate sequence in which we had turned the person into an amputee through visual effects. When Paul looked at it in context, he felt that this told the whole story in a single scene and he would rather have it be revealed over the timeline of the film. So we decided to lose it entirely.”

Like other editors, Jo Francis used story cards to help organize the cut. She continued, “There were 213 scenes in the script and cards helped us stay organized. I typically use printed note cards and picture reference cards that I place on the wall. When you move scenes around a lot, this gives you a quick bird’s eye view of the story structure.” Paul Haggis is known for a writing style that interleaves the lives of various characters, such as in his screenplay for Crash. In this case, the storyline was more straightforward. According to Jo, “This wasn’t an ensemble cast, like in Crash. The story primarily focuses on Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron. As we explore the emotional relationship between Jones’ character and his son, the film also plays on the relationship between Theron’s character and her own son. It also looks at the boys who committed the crime and what would have brought them to do that.”

The Editor’s Bag of Tricks

Modern editing software offers a toolset that extends the creativity of contemporary feature film editors. Jo Francis cuts on an Avid, so I asked her to share why the system makes the most sense for her. “I’ve always cut on Avids, so I really haven’t felt the need to use anything else. I know other editors like Final Cut, but once Avid Xpress Pro came along, I was able to use Avid’s comprehensive tools in an affordable and portable package. It’s become pretty commonplace in the last couple of years for an editor to take a laptop edit system with the media on a set of FireWire drives home or to the mix stage. In my case, I do that with Xpress Pro. I had it with me during the mix, so that I was able to double-check things. If anything was in question, I could easily call up my cut and see what was intended. As far as Avid’s tools, I use Animatte quite a bit. For example, I’ll routinely combine performances between two different takes and use Animatte to place someone’s head into another take. Or, I’ll use it to remove a boom from a shot. This will get redone as part of the digital intermediate, anyway, but that sort of thing is no longer a costly optical film effect. I also like to use the Locators a lot. I’ll place these on points in the timeline and add written descriptions to the Locators so I can easily find something.”

Francis works as much with the sound as the picture during her cut. Francis said, “More directors and studios expect that the rough cut coming out of the Avid has almost the look of a finished movie. So I make sure to replace audio with other takes or with the isolated tracks when that sounds better. I’ll do a lot of temp sound effects work and build up a temp score. On In the Valley of Elah, we used temp music from other films to get the right feel. Mark Isham (Crash) was our composer and his past films didn’t have scores that really worked for this film, so we didn’t end up using a lot of his past work as temp music. Any way, he wanted his own fresh take on the film.” In my own experience, I’ve seen when you can get too attached to some of the temp music cuts and I wondered if this had happened to Jo. She replied, “We actually had used a popular music track, but in the end were unable to license it. It turned out OK, though, because Mark was able to score a cue that had a similar feel and really worked far better than we had hoped.”

With In the Valley of Elah in the theaters, Jo Francis is taking a well-earned break before moving on to the next assignment. It’s not back to television, though. “I really like working in features. It’s a lot of fun and somewhat relaxed compared to series work, so I’m definitely moving on to another feature!” Maybe the next project will also stay in the family.